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a recurring theme within this book. We can illustrate this by considering the
phenomenon of teleworking.

>> TELEWORKING
ICTs potentially allow many knowledge workers to work remotely from ‘the
office’ and as such, theoretically, to be freer – freer to decide when to work,
how to work, where to work and so on. It is no longer necessary to be physically
present to have access to most organizational information and indeed to be in
contact with others. E-mails can be sent to anyone from almost anywhere in
the world and files and other information can be downloaded to be worked
on, again almost anywhere. So, a software engineer, working on a project to
design a new software package, can be working with a team that is geographi-
cally distributed across continents, communicating with them using e-mail,
videoconferencing and other groupware technology. Indeed, each member of
the team could possibly be working from their own home, or even from the
beach if they found this a conducive place at which to write software! While
not all jobs can be done virtually, and most jobs demand some physical pres-
ence some of the time, it is the case now that many workers could work, at
least part of the time, from their home or some other remote location of
their choice. This is particularly the case with knowledge workers (Perez et al.,
2007). We will refer to this as teleworking (others call it virtual homework-
ing, e-work or telecommuting) to distinguish it from virtual working, which
implies a person is working with others when they are not physically co-located
but this may still be in an on-site work environment. This is an important dis-
tinction because teleworking, not virtual working, contravenes the separation
of work and home that has characterized paid employment for many since the
Industrial Revolution.
ICTs are an enabler of such altered work arrangements – the material prop-
erties of mobile technologies make teleworking a realistic option. True, some
people have continued to work from home throughout the industrial era, for
example, women working from home in cottage industries where work, such
as garment-making, is taken to individuals’ homes for completion. However,
developments in ICTs open up this option to a much greater range of work-
ers, including knowledge workers. Nevertheless, the development of ICTs per se
does not drive such change. Indeed, research has tended to show that, despite
the fact that developments in ICTs make it potentially possible for many people
to work at home at least some of the time, the numbers who actually do this are
very small (Bailey and Kurland, 2002). For example, Korte and Gareis (2002)
reported that only 6.1 per cent of workers in Europe regularly work from home
and this figure appears to be fairly consistent across countries (e.g. Schweitzer
and Duxbury (2002) report a figure of 6 per cent in Canada). More recent
data from Australia suggests that the numbers might be increasing, with 30
per cent of respondents indicating that they at least occasionally worked away

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